Hirschman Leonard Leopoldovich (1839-1921)

Hirschman (Hirschmann, Girshman) Leonard Leopoldovich (1839, Tukkum, Courland Governorate – 1921, Kharkov) – ophthalmologist, founder of the Russian school of ophthalmology.

Leonard Hirshman graduated from the medical faculty of Kharkov University in 1860.

He trained in the laboratories of Emil du Bois-Reymond and Hermann von Helmholtz, and in the clinics of Albrecht von Graefe and others. In 1868, he defended his doctoral thesis, Materials for the Physiology of Colour Perception. In 1871, he established an eye clinic, and in 1895 founded and headed Russia’s first department of ophthalmology at Kharkov University.

In 1905, Hirschman resigned from the university in protest against the illegal dismissal (without disciplinary court approval, where he served as chair) of a group of students involved in political unrest. He was held in high esteem by the public. Thanks to donations from the people of Kharkov, an eye hospital with an outpatient clinic was built and opened in 1908, where Hirschman worked until the end of his life. He personally treated nearly one million patients.

He also spearheaded the founding of a school for the blind in Kharkov. Since 1886, he was honorary chair of the Kharkov Medical Society.

Leonard Hirschman authored works on colour perception physiology, the embryology of retinal vessels, trachoma treatment, pharmacologically induced miosis and mydriasis, and the physiology of visual acuity. The Ukrainian Research Institute of Eye Diseases in Kharkiv and an eye hospital in St Petersburg are named in his honour.

Selected works:

К лечению трахомы (On the Treatment of Trachoma), Kharkov, 1873;

Трахома, как народное бедствие (Trachoma as a National Scourge), Kharkov, 1900.